So, another attempt to set a date on getting every school into a multi-academy trust has failed: the Schools Bill has been ditched and with it the target for a fully academised, MAT-led system by 2030.

The government had previously set out for this to be achieved by 2020. So, will it try again? 

Ideologically, there is little in the way to stop the government hitting its goal at some stage. The system has passed a tipping point and Labour has already acknowledged that, should it get into power, it won’t reverse the tide. 

But while there may be political will to make the change happen, getting enough people into the sector to lead all these trusts - not just CEOs but finance managers, HR professionals, IT leads and more - has been woefully under-recognised as a key challenge. So much so, in fact, that we are in danger of shaping the system not according to what is needed, but by what we can resource. 

What, then, can be done about it?

The people problem 

Research from FFT Education Datalab suggests that there are around 10,000 schools in 2,539 trusts already - out of an England-wide total of 24,454 schools. So, around 14,400 schools still need to find a MAT home.

If the government’s aim was for MATs to generally have at least 10 schools, that would mean 1,400 or so new MATs coming into existence. That would be 1,400 new CEOs, 1,400 new finance directors, 1,400 new HR directors, and so on.

Traditionally, these leaders of the future would rise up through schools. However, we’re struggling to fill the leadership roles we already have, let alone thousands more.

‘If we’re creating more trusts, we are creating a whole new layer of people working at trust level’

The latest figures from the Department for Education show that more than one in three newly appointed secondary school headteachers and deputies aged under 50 leave their post within five years, along with one in four primary school leaders.

Not only does this mean that we have fewer staff to pick from for central MAT roles, but picking from what is left for central leadership roles will deplete that pool further, according to James Bowen, head of policy at school leaders’ union the NAHT.

“If we’re creating more trusts, we are creating a whole new layer of people working at trust level, which ultimately could be a drain at school level. That is a real concern because we don’t have a surplus of people at the moment,” he tells Tes.

Routes to the top

Tes columnist Sam Freedman, a former senior policy adviser at the DfE and a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, also questions whether the sector has the necessary routes to develop these roles.

“I am concerned about the lack of high-quality training programmes for those roles, or even research into how to do them effectively. They are clearly very different from school teaching or leadership roles, yet we expect people to just figure out how to do them well,” he says.

Freedman is not alone in worrying about this. Stephen Morales, chief executive of the Institute of School Business Leadership, who recently completed a research project entitled Barriers to joined-up leadership in the English education system, explains that the trajectory for ramping up the supply line of leaders is steep, but the investment in that pipeline is very shallow.  

“Even when we’ve invested in our leaders, we haven’t necessarily invested in programmes that are broad enough and rounded enough to deal with the complexities of a fully autonomous system that works outside of local authority control,” he says.

“For headteachers who are moving from headship to chief executive of a multi-academy trust, what development journey have they been on? Frankly, a week-long residential is not going to cut it.”

Instead, he argues, these future leaders need to be developing “the broader skills required to run complex multimillion-pound organisations, including financial governance, risk management and project management”.

The options

No small task, then. The government does appear to be aware of the challenge, though: it has introduced four 12- to 18-month leadership-focused national professional qualifications (NPQs), designed to prepare staff for either early years leadership, senior leadership, headship or executive leadership that could offer routes to MAT leadership.

More notably, in September the government announced the launch of the multi-academy trust leadership development offer expert advisory group, set up in part to look at the “knowledge, skills and behaviours that individuals need to perform the role of CEO for large MATs”.

Leora Cruddas, chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, is a member of the group and says its work will be essential to guide how the sector ensures that it has the right calibre of leaders going forward.

“The group is advising ministers on a content framework and a new trust leadership offer. It is very important that we have trust leaders who have the knowledge, skills and qualities to lead the system going forward,” she says.

‘Government are not the experts; the system is’

However, Sir Steve Lancashire, the former CEO of REAch2 Academy Trust who now runs courses for Forum Strategy entitled “Becoming the CEO” and “Becoming the COO”, is sceptical that such a group is necessary, arguing that provision in the sector already exists.

“More government involvement may not be the best solution,” he says. “Government are not the experts; the system - working together with expert thinkers - is.

“A system- and expert-led solution is much more sustainable and informed by the latest knowledge and thinking.”

Morales, meanwhile, says that what the government is offering may not go far enough to give leaders the huge array of skills they require to run a MAT without any external support.

“[In the past you had] the generalist who was a fantastic, committed, loyal, enthusiastic servant to the local school context, with the technical support from local authorities,” he notes.

Yet in a MAT world, that LA support would be gone, so he wonders how individuals in senior positions would “operate in a world where regulation, scrutiny and accountability stakes are so high”. 

What are we aiming for?

What complicates the issue further is that we don’t actually know what the ideal size of a leadership team is for different sizes of MAT. There has been little research into this - and there is no clear idea on the size of MAT the government wants, beyond 10 schools or 8,000 pupils being an apparent minimum.

That means we don’t have a clear idea of the shortfall of leaders that we might have, nor how to plan to avoid it.

“The DfE needs to be much more open about their modelling here,” says Bowen. “What do they see the future looking like in terms of how many trusts they think there will be?

“Because there’s talk about a minimum of 10 [schools in a trust]. But we know there are plenty of trusts that have more than 10 schools, so what does the finished system look like? How many trusts will there be?

“Have they modelled for the kind of numbers of additional staff that we might need?”

Morales notes, too, that if staff are operating in lots of smaller MATs, it could leave many “really vulnerable”, because “every time the government introduces new legislation or has bigger requirements of them - Covid was a perfect example - they get stretched to the absolute limit”. 

“A very small central team or senior leadership team trying to deal with all these things becomes incredibly difficult,” he explains.

There is a school of thought, however, that the system will resolve these issues in much the same way it overcame challenges when the academies movement got started.

Sir David Carter, who was CEO of the Cabot Learning Federation from 2014 to 2016 and then national schools commissioner from 2016 until 2018, says he has seen first-hand how the sector has adapted to find the new staff needed for growth - and believes the same thing will happen in the new era, too.

“In-house development from the strongest trusts has seen them talent spot and develop people into these roles ahead of time,” he says. “This is certainly true of the educational leadership roles and, to an extent, the finance/HR type position as well.”

There is certainly evidence that some of these roles could be filled by existing staff, and some trusts will offer new routes to leadership for teachers who would not have considered it before.

Stepping up

Gwennan Harrison-Jones is headteacher at Cams Hill School in Fareham, Hampshire, a role she has held since 2015. But since September she has been executive headteacher of the comprehensive secondary (which is currently a single-academy trust with 1,250 students) two days per week and CEO of a small MAT for three days. 

It’s a role she is excited about but she admits it’s not one she has had much training for - echoing the concerns of Morales and Freedman.

“How much of my teacher training has prepared me to lead a business? Not very much,” she says. “I am doing NPQEL [the National Professional Qualification for Executive Leadership], which is interesting and useful - but I would certainly take a lot more encouragement to apply for the CEO of a large commercial business than I did for this role (not that I’d ever rule it out).” 

‘How much of my teacher training has prepared me to lead a business? Not very much’

The idea that people who have not previously considered system leadership may step up is something that Steve Rollett, deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, thinks could be a huge positive - not just for CEO positions but for the other central team roles, such as leading teaching and learning. 

“I think it’s got the potential to be really beneficial,” he says.

He gives the example of someone ending up in the role of “head of continuing professional development” and explains how their work would influence multiple schools and, ideally, be drawn from in-depth and detailed work.

“It’s not someone who’s just knocking out a few courses and a few PowerPoints [presentations] - it’s someone becoming a real expert in their field,” he says.

“They’ve got more time to work and think strategically about what’s going on within the area that they’re leading. If you think back to the old system, when that sort of responsibility was held just within a single school, that person was trying to do that on top of all the other stuff that they were doing, and, of course, often they were isolated as a result.” 

Grow your own

What this means for the long term, he continues, is that MATs can become “sites of knowledge building”, helping to “develop and then disseminate the best that we can know about that particular domain”.

And this is what could really excite a new generation of future leaders, Rollett says. “We’re seeing more sophisticated job roles being created with more routes to progress your career within trusts than we used to see.

“I think that’s how the profession moves on in terms of the next iteration of quality.”

Sir Steve agrees, noting that the growth of MATs is itself organically creating possibilities for more people to step up into leadership roles.

“As an example, REAch2 has eight regional directors all responsible for up to eight schools, which, in itself, is like a small MAT. Each of these could and may well go on to be CEO of other trusts,” he says.

However, the leadership data cited earlier suggests that it is not the job title that puts people off or makes them leave; rather, it is the accountability, scrutiny and stress.

Bowen says: “The worry for us is we are facing retention challenges and there is a concern that any structural change might inadvertently make that more of a challenge.”

Bringing in expertise

The big question here, of course, is whether the schools sector will have to provide all the future leaders in the system. Many believe non-education specialists will become increasingly common in MAT leadership - especially if plans to become a fully academised system return.

This is something Rollett believes should be embraced and will play a big part in helping to meet the need for MAT staff.

“If we think back to a time before MATs, there wasn’t the collective clout at school level to bring in those highly effective operators from outside of education,” he says.

“But now we do have that and so we are seeing pretty high-calibre individuals being recruited from elsewhere. That will be right for some trusts and not for others, and some will continue to recruit people who have come up through the traditional classroom route for those key positions.”

‘If we really want a world-class system, we need to invest in people first’

One CEO who exemplifies this is Rowena Hackwood, of Astrea Academy Trust, who has spoken to Tes in the past about her belief that much of the future growth of MATs will come from people with non-education backgrounds.

“Making sure that we continue to have a rich combination of educationalists, together with people like myself - who bring expertise from outside the sector - will, I think, be all the more important as the sector matures further,” she says.

What’s more, it’s not just a question of those in other sectors deciding on a whim to enter education: there are many actively trying to woo these people to trusts, such as Helen Stevenson, director of Satis Education, a recruitment consultancy that specialises in placing education CEOs and other leadership roles.

“We are strong advocates of the fact that there are people with really strong skill sets from other sectors, and we should be actively encouraging them to join the education sector,” she says.

“We’re looking at large organisations that need more strategic leadership that will take them away from the day-to-day aspects of school improvement, but more with a need to be able to hold people to account and develop accountability frameworks.”

It’s all about people

So, will this mix of external appointments and internal career ladder climbers ensure that the sector has the skills and headcount needed to achieve the government’s MAT target?

Well, the reality right now is it’s almost impossible to know - not least because the government remains, according to many cited above, too opaque about how exactly it envisions a fully academised system will work, and therefore how many staff will be required to run it.

“If we need more people in system capacity then the DfE needs a plan to do that,” says Bowen.

Morales agrees and says there can be no doubt that this is one of the most important aspects of any move towards a fully academised system, and it should be front and centre of the strategy.

“If we really want a world-class system, we need to invest in people first. Invest in the capability of your workforce: invest in good business leaders, good governance and leaders that can really lead in this complex world,” he says.

If we don’t, we may end up with the system we can staff, not the system the sector deserves. 

Zofia Niemtus is a freelance journalist. Additional reporting by Dan Worth, senior editor at Tes